from Hacker News

My experience writing and selling a short story

by superamit on 7/12/22, 8:13 PM with 156 comments

• by eloff on 7/12/22, 9:44 PM

  My brother writes Sci Fi for a living. He's self taught and self published. He does well, he's sold over a million books. What many people don't know is he suffered from severe tendonitis that really narrowed his career options. He started writing because he could write using voice recognition software. Now he writes with a keyboard, as the pain is more manageable. I'm extremely proud of him for how well he's been able to carve out his own path in life, in the developing world, against adversity.

  https://www.amazon.com/Jasper-T.-Scott/e/B00B7A2CT4%3Fref=db...

• by PuppyTailWags on 7/12/22, 9:41 PM

  This is an excellent view on how writing speculative fiction actually works. Amit's publication to Tor should be lauded as a serious achievement in his career and not something that an average person could reasonably expect to achieve/plan for. Congratulations to him.

  Please consider reading the work itself here: https://www.tor.com/2022/06/01/india-world-amit-gupta/

• by ivraatiems on 7/12/22, 9:44 PM

  It's worth noting that Tor's pay for authors is in the absolute top tier. I've had a short story published in a smaller publication, and they paid me $50 total - $25 for the first six months exclusivity, then $25 again for inclusion in an anthology. That is more typical for a starting out author.

  OTOH, getting published in Tor at all is a much much bigger achievement - congratulations to the author!

• by ordinaryradical on 7/12/22, 10:11 PM

  Did anyone find it curious that the revision process highlights perceived moral impurities (immigrant deportation commentary, MAGA similarity) as story failures / problems?

  There’s a profound sub-narrative here on self-censorship, what is or isn’t acceptable within the bounds of fiction, and how genre in-groups police themselves toward Acceptable Messages.

• by avk on 7/13/22, 6:35 AM

  Congrats to superamit! Well done with your persistence and I hope Uncanny is receptive to your future submissions. I'm excited to read the story.

  Disclaimer: light self-promo. Are others interested in more publishing posts like these? I've documented the journey to publication stories with stats, rejections, and a sense of the work involved for most of the short fiction I've published in literary journals. It's been cathartic and encouraging to share the entire process.

  My most notable piece[1] ended up making it into The Best American Mystery Stories[2] a few years ago.

  [1]: https://arsenalofwords.com/2018/10/30/how-loathing-travel-pu...

  [2]: https://arsenalofwords.com/2019/10/01/how-a-regional-writing...

• by paulpauper on 7/12/22, 9:13 PM

  writing has to be among the worst ways to make money, sorry to say

  you need top .5% talent and work ethic to maybe earn a lower-middle class salary

  A labor of love, as it's said

• by pipnonsense on 7/12/22, 10:11 PM

  superamit (or anyone else who writes fiction really), would you publish your stories on a "substack for fiction"?

  I already built it, although it is in Portuguese. https://www.confabulistas.com.br

  It would be easy to translate to English and try it in the US market. Is there any interest for that?

  It is just like Substack. You create your page, people subscribe and get your fiction by email. The main difference is that people can read your books from the beginning, from the first chapter, in installments. With Substack (or any newsletter platform) new people can only get the future emails from the time they subscribed. In my site people will receive the first installment/chapter of the book (you can have several books published in there, one can be "Short stories").

  It has the "paid subscribers" feature also.

  I built it mostly to myself, as I am starting a side-career as a fiction writer wanted to own my audience. Fiction writers currently don't have a good platform to both distribute their work and gather an audience. What I built does the job pretty well I think.

  Any interest?

• by Barrera on 7/13/22, 1:25 AM

  > I spent 22 hours, 18 minutes, and 47 seconds writing and editing “India World” across 42 sessions in Google Docs. (Not including hours more spent editing on paper, revising the story at workshops, or reading critiques.)

  Given the quality of the work, I suspect that 2x-5x that many hours were spent on developing and revising the story (the parenthetical part). So let's call it 66 hours total.

  Later:

  > 8/27/2020 - RUOXI FROM TOR.COM EMAILED TO BUY THE STORY! They offered $1422.80 for exclusive digital, audio, and ebook rights for one year, non-exclusive afterward. Likely publication: early 2021. I said yes!

  So, ballpark $20/hr. Some commenters have noted the low pay for this kind of work. How it's a labor of love rather than a living. And Tor apparently pays top dollar. On top of the fee, there's a profit sharing program, which starts to sound pretty good. But again, this looks to be the ceiling.

  What's more interesting are the non-financial terms. The author can sell the work to others after one year. Depending on whether the author retains copyright (seems to be implied), this could be a pretty interesting way to go. I'm thinking about things like expansion into a novel, movie or other derivative works, for example. The acceptance letter doesn't quite make it clear how this works. How does it work?

• by atum47 on 7/13/22, 12:02 AM

  Back in 2013 I published my first book. It's a collection of "funny" texts that I wrote during my blog years. It was hard as you can imagine to publish it. Even harder to make money out of it. My publisher is from Portugal and I'm from Brazil, they sold the books in both countries. I know for a fact that some of my friends bought the book, but they never showed on the publisher spreadsheet of how many books they sold and how much I've earned. It was a proud moment of my life nevertheless, but it would be more fun if I have made some money out of it.

• by Havoc on 7/12/22, 9:55 PM

  Nice! Purchased a copy. For those looking you need to add author name - doesn't show up with just title on amazon

  Haven't seen this before:

  >this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

• by georgeoliver on 7/13/22, 5:20 AM

  I'm curious about the stats for SF readers/writers/publishers. As the parent post relates, compared to the past there are a lot less publishers and it would be extremely difficult to be a professional SF short story writer as your sole occupation. Has the pool of writers grown or stayed the same? What about readers?

• by vincentmarle on 7/13/22, 12:25 AM

  I was once interested in how self publishing actually works so I spent an hour or two putting a pdf together with Chuck Norris facts that I found on the internet and published it as a paperback. The book is still up for sale, I've made more than $10,000 from it.

• by RickJWagner on 7/13/22, 12:34 AM

  Thanks to the author for sharing this experience. Interesting!

• by paxys on 7/13/22, 12:27 AM

  Very surprised that the author was paid per word. Is that still a thing in publishing?

• by wslh on 7/12/22, 10:51 PM

  How much do you earn if your short story ends up in a movie?

• by no-s on 7/13/22, 12:47 AM

  Optimistic SF is retro SF. Thanks!

• by ankaAr on 7/12/22, 10:31 PM

  Nice story!!

• by radiojasper on 7/12/22, 11:01 PM

  You made a bit over 1k. 3 years of effort for 1.4k. You failed.

• by gizajob on 7/12/22, 9:58 PM

  It's a pretty terrible, hackneyed, non-story, now I've read it. Flag me down all you like. Seems like the author is more interested in the stats about writing than the actual writing.

  Some simple advice would be to read some Neal Stephenson, Paul Auster, and China Mieville for starters, not Michael Crichton. Good writing is a serious art and craft. It's irrelevant how many hours a specific work takes down to the second. The author seems to think writing is hard and slow. It is slow, but after the first decade or two it gets quicker when the inspiration comes.